Anza Report Finds Commercial-Scale Battery Prices Stalled While Utility-Scale Costs Keep Falling

Utility-scale battery storage system prices in the United States have fallen as much as 20.9 percent since May 2025. Distribution-scale system prices have not moved since November.

That divergence is the headline finding of Anza Renewables’ first-quarter 2026 pricing report, summarized this week by Utility Dive. Anza tracks system-level pricing across product classes, and for most of the past three years those classes moved together: cheaper cells, cheaper packs, cheaper systems, across the board. They have now split. AC-configured utility-scale systems have continued their descent. Distribution-scale systems, the tier sized for commercial buildings rather than merchant power plants, are flat since November 2025 and only about 14 percent below where they sat a year ago.

Anza’s explanation is blunt. Suppliers are concentrating their attention on large data-center and independent power producer orders, and treating the distribution-scale segment as an afterthought.

The two markets. A battery is a battery, but the customers are not interchangeable. Utility-scale procurement means contracts measured in hundreds of megawatt-hours, signed by developers with financing already arranged and standardized equipment specifications. Distribution-scale procurement means a project at a single commercial building or a small cluster of them, sized in the hundreds of kilowatt-hours, with site-specific engineering and a smaller order behind it.

For a cell manufacturer or system integrator allocating finite production and finite sales-engineering capacity, the choice is not difficult. The large orders clear faster, carry lower transaction costs per megawatt-hour, and come from repeat buyers. When demand outstrips what suppliers want to serve, the smaller, more bespoke segment is the one that waits.

Where the megawatts are going. The demand pulling supplier attention upward has a name, and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence put a number on it this week. Roughly 56 GW of planned US data-center capacity, close to a third of the national pipeline, is now on track to source some or all of its power on-site, up from under 2 GW of proposed on-site capacity in late 2024. Benchmark projects that data centers will account for 83 percent of all commercial and industrial behind-the-meter battery deployments by 2030.

Read alongside the Anza report, the picture resolves. The behind-the-meter storage market is not one market growing quickly. It is two markets, and the larger one is absorbing the supply chain’s capacity, its pricing discipline, and its engineering hours.

The data-center buildout behaves like utility-scale procurement even though the meter sits behind the customer. Orders are large, technically standardized, and backed by hyperscaler balance sheets. A commercial building owner installing storage to cut a demand charge is buying from the same vendors but is, in practice, in a different queue.

What this does to commercial economics. The standard argument for behind-the-meter storage at an office, hospital, hotel, or retail property rests on falling hardware costs meeting rising electricity charges. Both halves were supposed to be working in the buyer’s favor.

The rising-charges half is intact and then some. Anza’s afternoon counterpart in this week’s data is the commercial rate trend: 97.5 percent of US commercial facilities saw electricity rate increases between 2020 and 2025, at a 5.9 percent median compound annual growth rate. PJM capacity prices are on a path to rise roughly nine to twelve times over the next several years, with annual capacity cost for a typical 1 MW commercial load projected to climb from about $10,000 in 2024 to more than $120,000 by 2027. Those costs increasingly flow through commercial demand and capacity charges. Every dollar of that escalation raises the value of a kilowatt shaved.

The falling-hardware half is where the Anza report intervenes. For commercial buyers, it is now substantially weaker than the headline storage-pricing narrative suggests. “Battery prices fell again” has been true at the cell and pack level, and true at utility scale. At the system level for distribution-scale projects, it has not been true for six months.

A commercial owner modeling a 2026 installation on the assumption that equipment will keep getting cheaper is modeling the wrong segment’s cost curve. The payback math improves because rates are climbing, not because the hardware is following the trajectory it followed in 2023 and 2024.

The opening underneath the headwind. A supply chain that treats a customer segment as spillover is, by the same token, a supply chain that has left that segment open. The vendors deprioritizing distribution-scale work are making a rational allocation decision under capacity constraint. They are also ceding the field.

This is the structural read worth holding onto. The flat pricing is a headwind for commercial buyers procuring now. It is, simultaneously, an unserved-demand signal for any integrator willing to build a sales and engineering motion around buildings rather than around merchant power plants. Stem’s exit from C&I hardware, documented in its Q1 2026 results, removed one incumbent from exactly this space. Anza’s report explains why the vacuum has not been filled by price competition: the suppliers with capacity would rather sell it to data centers.

The segmentation problem. There is a measurement consequence here that extends beyond procurement. If data centers reach 83 percent of “commercial and industrial behind-the-meter” deployments by 2030, then the headline figure for that category will increasingly describe a market that ordinary commercial buildings do not participate in.

Analysts, investors, and policymakers who track “C&I BTM” as a single number will be tracking a data-center number with a building-sited remainder folded in. The Anza fracture is the first hard pricing evidence that the two should be counted separately. They already behave separately. Soon the statistics that lump them together will mislead anyone making a decision about the smaller one.

For now, the practical takeaway for a building owner is narrow and specific. The reason to install storage in 2026 is the rate curve, which is steep and well documented. It is not the equipment curve, which, for projects this size, has gone flat.

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